ITX fun factory – ASUS P8H67-I Deluxe mini-ITX

Test System

Normally, motherboard testing is performed on an open air test bench with a 750W PSU and a 580GTX video card. The constraint of the H67 chipset removes multiplier overclocking and memory speeds beyond 1333 MHz, combined with the poor BUS clocking capabilities of Intel’s 1155 socket processors a real world environment setup was used instead.

Due to limited cooling in the Case, the PSU fan was flipped to pull air through the PSU and a 120mm YateLoon HS fan was added to the second HDD location to exhaust air out the side.

A low power HDD was also used in the Greenpower series from Western Digital. It provides lower power consumption and thus heat as well as near silent operation perfect for a Small Form Factor build.

Case: Apex MI-008 with 250W PSU

RAM: Corsair 2x2GB 1333 MHZ C9 SODIMM CT2KIT25664BC1339

CPU: Intel 2500K 2nd generation i5

HDD: Western Digital Greenpower 1TB

CPU heat sink: Intel stock

Case cooling: 120mm Yate Loon HS

Software used for testing

PCMark Vantage

Performance Test 7

AIDA64 Engineer edition 1.85

Cinebench 11.5 x64

SpecViewPerf11

SuperPi 1.5

wPrime 1.55

3dMark Vantage

Handbrake .94

Media Espresso 6.5

TechARP x264 media encoder test

Bootracer

The IGP of the 2nd generation Core I series is limited to DirectX 10 so 3dMark11 was not included in synthetic testing. For Encoding tests Big Buck Bunny 1080P was used, a freely downloadable 10 minute Open Source animated short. PCMark 7 is also excluded as the storage tests are not indicative of actual storage performance.